Cray Launches Next-Generation Supercomputer

SEATTLE and SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 14, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- At the 2016 Supercomputing Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today announced the launch of the Cray® XC50™ supercomputer – the company’s fastest supercomputer ever with a peak performance of one petaflop in a single cabinet.

The Cray XC50 supercomputer is engineered to address the broad application performance challenges of today’s most demanding high performance computing (HPC) users. Special features of the Cray XC50 supercomputer include:

the industry-leading Aries network interconnect, which is designed specifically to meet the performance requirements seen in today’s emerging class of data center GPU accelerated applications, where high node-to-node communication performance is critical;

a Dragonfly network topology tightly integrated with Aries that reduces communication latency for scale-out applications that rely heavily on the Message Passing Interface;

support for the NVIDIA® Tesla® P100 GPU accelerator as well as support for next-generation Intel® Xeon® and Intel Xeon Phi™ processors.

“Supercomputing applications are evolving to include more deep learning algorithms, and with this evolution, the uses for GPUs in our systems are increasing, enabling our customers to use new analytics techniques to gain insight from increasingly large and complex data,” said Ryan Waite, Cray’s senior vice president of products. “The new Cray XC50 system represents a major advancement in our supercomputing capabilities. It provides the highest performance density of any Cray supercomputer, and gives customers the computational resources they need to take on larger, more complex workloads, as well as the next generation of scientific challenges.”

Located in Lugano, Switzerland, CSCS is currently upgrading its Cray XC30™ supercomputer nick-named “Piz Daint” to a Cray XC50 system, and will combine it with the Centre’s Cray XC40™ supercomputer nick-named “Piz Dora”. Once completed, the combined system will adopt the Piz Daint name and will be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

“Our new Cray XC50 supercomputer will significantly accelerate our computational research capabilities allowing our users to perform more advanced, data-intensive simulations, visualizations and data analyses across a wide array of scientific studies,” said Prof. Dr. Thomas C. Shulthess, director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). “Cray’s next-generation supercomputer and its continued integration of GPU acceleration has created a powerful and efficient hybrid multi-core system for addressing our current and future HPC workloads.”

For more information on the Cray XC50 supercomputer, please visit the Cray website at www.cray.com.

About Cray Inc.Global supercomputing leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) provides innovative systems and solutions enabling scientists and engineers in industry, academia and government to meet existing and future simulation and analytics challenges. Leveraging more than 40 years of experience in developing and servicing the world’s most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers and big data storage and analytics solutions delivering unrivaled performance, efficiency and scalability. Cray’s Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to meet the market’s continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

Safe Harbor StatementThis press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, including, but not limited to, statements related to the availability of future processors (including accelerators) for Cray XC50 systems, the system purchased by CSCS and Cray's ability to deliver a system that meets CSCS's requirements. These statements involve current expectations, forecasts of future events and other statements that are not historical facts. Inaccurate assumptions and known and unknown risks and uncertainties can affect the accuracy of forward-looking statements and cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could affect actual future events or results include, but are not limited to, the risk that Cray is not able to successfully complete its planned product development efforts in a timely fashion or at all, the risk that the processors (including accelerators) planned for Cray XC50 systems are not available with the performance expected or when expected or are not incorporated into Cray XC50 systems when expected or at all, the risk that that the system required by CSCS does not perform as expected, and such other risks as identified in the Company’s quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2016, and from time to time in other reports filed by Cray with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. You should not rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this release. Cray undertakes no duty to publicly announce or report revisions to these statements as new information becomes available that may change the Company’s expectations.

Cray, and the stylized CRAY mark and are registered trademarks of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries, and XC50, DataWarp, XC30 and XC40 are trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.